What is ‘race’ and how does racism shape the modern world? How do race, gender and sexuality interact with each other in producing social and economic hierarchies? Drawing on the argument of Barbara Fields and Karen Fields that race is produced by practices of racism, rather than an effect of the existence of racial difference, this course traces the ways in race is crafted. Thinking about ‘racecraft’ rather than ‘race’ enables us to make visible the historical processes that underpin race thinking, and thereby to make the concepts available for critique. The course begins from debates in (and about) Africa, rather than from the diaspora. Although African debates and diasporic debates intersect and shape each other, this course centres the vibrant intellectual and political work that accompanied some of the most profound challenges to colonialism and white supremacy. By examining contexts where blackness is the condition of the majority, and where challenges to white power are embedded in radical utopian imaginations of freedom, self-sufficiency and sovereignty, we might rethink the relationships between race and democracy.